Man I am seeing this _everywhere_ now. If you don’t have a clean residential US IP half the internet doesn’t work.
Then it would either redirect humans like a normal service or serve a page with meta tags to the crawlers so the card info on social media would have a thumbnail saying "breaking news" and a markov generated caption such as "Earlier today researchers successfully demonstrated time travel at MIT" with the stub matching the title just to increase the chaos.
Ran it a couple of years. Not only did nobody use it but the response was universally discouraging and negative.
Lesson: People enjoy facsimiles of things they find repulsive when it becomes too real. All things have an uncanny valley. It's why people, for example, don't go to butcher shops and pick up animal organs for Halloween decorations.
I find the uncanny valley to be a wonderful artistic experience, like a psychological rollercoaster where there's always something new. But that's a very niche response
> Not only did nobody use it but the response was universally discouraging and negative.
What were the negative things that people said?
One of my problems is I'm quick to abandon my efforts and discount any faith I have in a project and I do so subconsciously. I'm the opposite of stubborn: a sabotaging level of flexible.
Part of behavior change I think is identifying when emotional decisions happen without any intellectual agency.
Figuring out when I'm pivoting without realizing it is a key way to improve myself.
Yup, sounds about like what you hear from your average keyboard warrior. I wish there were a "low effort" filter on comments.
> I'm the opposite of stubborn: a sabotaging level of flexible.
That's tough. Hang in there. Keep making cool stuff. And thanks for sharing your creations with the world.
If it were TRULY shady, no way they'd use such an obvious URL. Must be safe and a joke!
https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...
This reminded me of a backend-less filesharing site I once made
Nice bait mate.
> © 1999 url shorteners are so yesterday try this amazing super long url expander . All rights reserved.
I tried to confirm that, but the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine are still down.
> whois urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.site
...
Domain Name: URLSHORTENERSARESOYESTERDAYTRYTHISAMAZINGSUPERLONGURLEXPANDER.SITE
Registry Domain ID: D492058866-CNIC
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.hostinger.com
Registrar URL: https://www.hostinger.com/
Updated Date: 2024-10-08T18:01:33.0Z
Creation Date: 2024-10-08T18:01:29.0Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2025-10-08T23:59:59.0Z
...
The page design is nevertheless charmingly retro.
A few days after the above exchange, the Wayback Machine was back online and I ran the site’s URL through it. The only archived version was from October 9, 2024.
It just so happens that I am working on a tool that ends up expanding hacker news urls. The problem I was solving was that of managing lots of replies to a successful post.
I allow you to replace the "ycombinator" in a hacker news item url with "gipety" so this current thread would point to:
https://news.gipety.com/item?id=41780255
You will then get a page that remembers the comments currently displayed. On subsequent refreshes you will see any new comments highlighted in green.
As I worked on it I decided to also add a slug as I got tired of not recognising what the urls I was copy pasting were referring to.
The above will for example end up generating this:
https://news.gipety.com/hn/41780255/k/67/s/show-hn-i-made-a-...
Most of all, I love the fact that, unlike URL shorteners, there's no need to maintain a database of redirects.
I do wonder what the actual encoding scheme is, and how robust it is to lopping off chunks of the URL, since there's presumably lots of room for redundancy...
It should instead append at the end of the URL some 1000-character long token with a ton of other irrelevant arguments.
You know, exactly how Google Search loves to do when you right-click a search result and the address gets brutally scrambled.
I am on a recent iOS.
- add a donation button and buy a dedi from it - turn off the bot detection
thank me later ig
urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.com is still available
With a URL _lengthener_ though, you don't need it at all. The sheer amount of possible outcomes means that the odds of ever getting two of the same is infinitesimally tiny.
As a trivial example, consider a URL base64-ifier. You enter the URL, it spits out base64urlifier.example/?base64=[encoded URL] - this is trivially done in Javascript based on the inputs. To redirect, all you need to do is go to that URL, and the Javascript reads the query parameter, de-base64s it, and redirects you there. No need for anything server side.
If you designed the service like this (which you have more than enough entropy for in the lengthening side of things - encoding 200 bytes of URL in 5 bytes of shortened link is hard, encoding 200 bytes of URL in 4kb of URL is easy), you wouldn't have any server side components beyond "serving some HTML and Javascript." Put it in a static file host, use the free tier of Cloudflare, and you can scale basically infinitely without any actual server load (if your service is barely used, hits to the static host backend are cheap, and if it's being used heavily, it's always in cache so never hits the backend).
There's no reason every web service needs a webserver, database, and anti-bot services.
The only issue unique to shorteners is avoiding collisions, but giving each machine a different range can be done super easily by hand. No frameworks.
Beep Boop!
(I've let the page sit for a minute or so, and it hasn't concluded that I am not a bot yet, but also, I'm aware I look weird - Firefox, with Javascript JIT disabled, with no GPU acceleration)
I don't know what it's using on the backend, but it doesn't seem to pass for me, and doesn't give me the usual option to pick a baby chicken from a baby duck to prove I'm human.
> WEBGL_debug_renderer_info is deprecated in Firefox and will be removed. Please use RENDERER. v1:1:102781
> Turnstile Widget seem to have crashed: 9icuj api.js:1:17810
> Uncaught TurnstileError: [Cloudflare Turnstile] Error: 300030. > https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur... B2SIiwBB.js:9
sigh
I don't have WebGL support, so I can't use a URL lengthener, because the bot checker appears to crash shortly after. Someone stop this timeline, I want to get off.
The worst is probably hCaptcha. It asks up to 10 machine-translated questions involving machine-generated images to prove the user is not a machine. Something about this is funny to me.
This isn't the first time CloudFlare blocks me, but usually it's a CloudFlare page shown before the actual site's page renders.
Internet Service Denier
Poorly implemented and overly aggressive bot checkers are really ruining the web.
Used to be that I was seldom troubled by captchas and similar. Now it seems to be multiple times per day.
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